Communication Overkill

At Bill and Dave's company, you can never have too many meetings. Communication is key, they say. Any employee can call a line meeting whenever they feel like it. A coworker of mine can call a line meeting and then decide to call another meeting to discuss the results of the previous meeting. Management likes to encourage consensus at our meetings to solve problems. That's all fine and good, but have you ever tried to reach consensus with 39 other people? It doesn't work. We have line meetings, shift meetings, department meetings, Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) meetings, Coffee Talks (management propaganda sessions), Risk Assessment meetings, and it goes on and on. It just doesn't stop. I'll bet out of a fourty hour work week here most employees spend over half of that time in useless meetings. What a waste. I'm already fed up with it so I try to weasle my way out of as many meetings as possible so I can keep working. Manufacturing PC boards makes us money. Meetings do not.

Now don't get me wrong here. Some communication between coworkers and shifts is obviously important. Things change on a constant basis here and if you don't talk to the people you have to work with and depend on, you can screw things up in a hurry. At a minimum I try to find out what I need to do to keep working effectively. I don't want to go over business metrics for an area clear over on the other side of the building. I don't want to know what a department manager thinks our business outlook is going to be six months from now because quite frankly, they'll have it all wrong. I'm not interested in being baited with cups of cheap coffee and low grade cafeteria cookies to go to a Vice President's propaganda session. I want to keep busy at my job, and do my job well. That's it. All these meetings are frivolous and waste my time. I've learned this during the past year the hard way. I've attended far too many pointless meetings.

That Friday afternoon when my supervisor was finished harassing the day shift on their poor performance we went through a re-cap of production information that was for November and December. It appeared that swing shift roughly doubled the throughput capacity compared to day shift during those two months. Why am I not surprised? As a result of this at the end of the meeting my boss asked me to oversee a meeting between our two shifts on February first at two in the afternoon with the goal of getting them up to speed. I willingly agreed. So, before I left work that night I began collecting more dirt on day shift to back myself up with the facts, not opinion. Ironically enough that Friday morning day shift only did one Racking inventory at 6:55am. I saved the que sheet and I plan on bringing it to the February meeting. If they give me any lip I'm going to use that as a prime example of their shoddy work habits.

I expect at the February meeting the day shift retards will do whatever they can to resist any changes that might cause them to actually start working. I'm skeptical they will go along with any recommendations we present them with. They'll probably just sit there the whole time and try to defend themselves. This is going to be interesting.